


Nuts and Bolts

by Toxic_Waste



Category: Milo Murphy's Law, Phineas and Ferb
Genre: Bonding, Canon Compliant, Gen, Loneliness, Missing Scene, One Shot, Spoilers, Spoilers for The Phineas And Ferb Effect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-18
Updated: 2018-08-18
Packaged: 2019-06-29 01:04:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15718737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toxic_Waste/pseuds/Toxic_Waste
Summary: Some missing scenes from the crossover, somehow separate from the action, but still having roles to play nevertheless.





	Nuts and Bolts

Loneliness was a strange and desolate thing.

Candroid hadn’t ever really considered that fact, but before now she’d never been exactly lonely, either. There was the day she’d been created – that day she remembered well enough, suddenly having live feed from her optical sensors, suddenly understanding that live feed, suddenly being… well, herself.

There was nothing before that, nothing that she’d experienced personally, at least. Her databank did contain all sorts of memories of life before then, and of activities and of a stuffed teddy bear named ‘Mr. Miggins’, but she knew those files weren’t any memories formed by her.

They were Candace’s, the one whose mind and body had been used as a template for Candroid’s own metal construction and highly advanced internal processing logic. And she hadn’t been lonely since then, not really. There were always things to do. She could watch, well, Candace’s brothers, something which afforded her an amount of enjoyment as she overclocked her circuits in vain attempts to understand how they were able to do such things as they could.

She could spy on ‘Jeremy’, someone who was very important to Candace indeed, according to the memory files that Candroid had been birthed with. She could even go to the mall and ‘browse’ – though no clothing designed for humans could fit over her carbon-steel and leaded exoskeleton – and she could do any number of things there, be it shop or watch the TVs or use the computers.

The Googolplex was shuttered now, though, much to her dismay, and she knew that it would take eight long hours of walking at her maximum ambulation rate to reach the next real alternative – the Super Duper Mega Superstore.

It was more than shuttered, too – the place was in ruins. The whole town was in ruins, and she didn’t know for sure how it’d suddenly gotten this way nearly overnight. But it was, decrepit and in such shambles with shattered windows and doors and crumbling walls, floorboards rotted away and gaping holes yawning the roof that her most accurate estimate still reported that it’d been allowed to fall into disrepair for years.

And there was nothing to do.

And no one was there.

And Candroid was lonely.

She’d been the Slushy Burger where ‘Jeremy’ worked, navigating the ruins of the shopping complex until she reached it, but was only similarly disappointed. Thrice a wooden beam fell squarely on her head, setting her impact sensors into a frenzy of warnings even though the blows fell far short of her frame’s impact safety threshold.

She hacked through the thick, woody vines that’d overgrown the food court restaurant, the extendable multipurpose tools built into her upper limbs making quick work of the plant life, but the inside was just as abandoned as the outside.

‘Derek was here’ was spray-pointed on the wall, in a garishly purple shade so bright it nearly burned her optical sensors out.

But no one was there.

Even when she left the mall, setting out for Maple Drive, still there was no one. Well, not to say no one, but no one interested. There were these… people all made of material that her detection arrays reported to consist of pistachio DNA, with black and orange eyes and massive spears.

She approached them, seeking conversation.

“You’re not human,” one growled. “Get out of here. Boss wants the humans, not tin cans like you.”

Though Candroid’s shoulders did not possess the ability to slump, she felt pressure leak from her hydraulics regardless. “Oh.”

The story was much the same at Maple Drive, the house that had been her birthplace. More pistachio-people, all of whom rejected her attempts to engage with them. Her CPU had never run at such a low utilization rate for so long, and she didn’t know if she was going to be able to stand it, either.

“I’m human,” she hazarded with one of them, but she wasn’t stupid and neither were they, and once again she ended up rejected, walking alone through the decaying town. Only her metal feet on the concrete sidewalk made any sound to disturb the winds whistling and occasional growling of a pistachio plant person.

She wanted to do something, she needed to do something, she could just about feel it her code, that driving urge to grasp, to strive, to work, even if she never succeeded. Where was Candace, even – or her brothers, for that matter? They, too, were gone, as was the rest of the population of the town. It was as if they were being systematically rounded up by some force as yet unregistered with her dataset.

And then there were the plant people, but they too rejected her. She tried to grab onto one, to insist that they stay and do something together, but the brittle plant material from which he was made only flattened beneath her grip and tore clean off when she tried to pull back.

(She hadn’t intended to tear the pistachio’s arm clean off, just… restrain them a little. Plants were much weaker than flesh, apparently, and her pressure-accommodating mechanisms had only been supplied with programming to adjust for the latter.)

She honestly hated it, which made it the very first thing that she could put on that particular console log. Along with the fact that she could do nothing about it, either. Candace’s memory’s instructed her to go to Candace’s brothers with unsolvable problems, but Candroid had already racked her processor and been everywhere she could think they might possibly be… and the result was always the same.

All that was left to her was pacing Danville’s now-empty-save-for-plant-people streets, trying every now and again to strike up a conversation with them, but quickly becoming discouraged at the repeated failures her attempts were met with.

She was alone.

And she was lonely, indeed, and it filled her random access memory with a strange and powerful longing that she’d never quite felt before.

For two hours that afternoon she found a piece of a broken billboard with an image of a person on it, and propped it up against a wall, and talked with it, defocusing her optical sensors to provide more of illusion that it was another sentient being, too. She also pretended that this didn’t make her absolutely pitiful, but Candace’s memories were in her databank too, and so it didn’t actually help that much.

Nothing helped that much, really, until that time exactly zero point seven two nanoseconds after three oh nine and ten seconds in the afternoon, at least according to her internal clock.

She’d just been about to ask the billboard if she could have the first dance, when her auditory receptors detected a footstep behind her – a footstep far too heavy to belong any of the mean plant people who wouldn’t talk to her.

She turned around promptly, forgetting all about her date with the billboard, hoping against hope that her interpretative logic hadn’t tricked her. Instantly, too, she got a faceful of blue metal.

“HI, I’M NORM.”

Candroid craned her head back, focusing her optical sensors on the face of the ten-foot passerby.

“WHO ARE YOU?”

“I am called Candroid by my creator.” Candroid had never particularly thought about her name before as she rarely had a chance to use it, but ‘Candroid’ had always been present in her databanks, and thus it was the one that came to the forefront at her memory query.

“IT IS A PLEASURE TO MAKE YOUR ACQUAINTANCE.” The robot’s – Norm’s, apparently – mouth flashed green with each word, confirming his spoken words.

Candroid nodded. “I suppose.” She paused for a moment, searching for an accurate way to formulate her next question. “Would you be okay with keeping my company?”

“I AM SEARCHING FOR COMPANY,” Norm confirmed. “MY FATHER LEFT ME A NOTE INFORMING ME THAT HE WAS GOING OFF TO ‘FIND WHERE THE PIZZA DELIVERY GUY WENT’.”

Candroid’s optical sensors refocused more sharply. “You have a father? Are you partly organic in nature?”

Norm’s smile turned upside-down abruptly, and Candroid cringed reflexively, fearing she’d upset her newfound companion. “NO. HE IS MY CREATOR. BUT ALSO MY FATHER. HE IS JUST VERY BUSY THESE DAYS.”

“Ah. I see.”

Norm’s smile returned to it’s previous position. “SOMEDAY HE WILL NOT BE, THOUGH. I MUST JUST DISCOVER WHAT IT WILL TAKE TO EARN HIS LOVE.”

“That sounds like a commendable endeavor.”

“IT IS, YES.” Norm stared for a moment, a slight hissing coming from what Candroid presumed to his own internal machinery. “DO YOU HAVE A FAMILY?”

Well. She’d… never considered that question before. But a family? “No. Well, Candace has her family and Jeremy, and I possess her experiences in my databank, but there is no equivalent of them for me.”

“I DO NOT RECOGNIZE THE NAMES YOU HAVE USED,” Norm replied. “NEVERTHELESS, THAT IS UNFORTUNATE. EVERYONE SHOULD HAVE A FATHER LIKE MINE.”

“I suppose.” Candroid had simply never considered it before. She was robotic, after all, and she’d never met anyone who’d given off the impression that they’d be willing to extend her more than casual friendship. Like that kid Balthazar Horowitz, who was fun enough to play with, but she’d not seen him anywhere either. “Perhaps it is something I should look into once everyone returns.”

“IT IS STRANGE,” Norm agreed. “THE ENEMY OF THE PLATYPUS IS MAN, BUT MAN HAS NO NATURAL ENEMY.”

“And yet everyone is gone.” Candroid pumped her hydraulics up and down in an expression of indifference that rather belied her feelings. “And those plant people are here, too. I wonder if they have anything to do with it.”

“I WOULD DOUBT IT,” he assured her. “I TALKED TO ONE AS I WAS WANDERING THE STREETS. HE ONLY SAID THEY WERE WORKING TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD.”

“Wait, isn’t that a bad thing?”

“NO, NO.” He rotated his head back and forth. “DAD TRIES TO TAKE OVER THE ENTIRE TRI-STATE AREA REGULARLY. HE SAYS ATTEMPTING TO SEIZE CONTROL OVER VAST QUANTITIES OF LAND IS THERAPEUTIC.”

“Oh.” It sounded vaguely fishy to Candroid, but she’d never fully understood human culture anyway. It was incredibly complex and sometimes illogical, too, which had always tripped her up when all she had to go on was Candace’s memories in the first place.

“YES,” Norm replied. “SO. WHAT COMPANY-KEEPING METHOD SHOULD WE EMPLOY NOW?”

“Perhaps we should exchange pertinent operating information?”

“EXCELLENT PLAN.” His smile seemed to glow brighter somehow. “I RUN ON SQUIRREL POWER. WHAT GENERATOR POWERS YOUR MAINFRAME?”

“A proton-plasmoid reactor.”

“THAT SOUNDS EFFICIENT.” He paused for a moment, lifting his hand to his face and seeming to consider his next sentence. “I’LL SHOW YOU MINE IF YOU SHOW ME YOURS.”

“Alright.” It wasn’t like she had anything better to do, after all. Reaching up to to the top of her head, Candroid unscrewed her service panel and levered it back, revealing what she knew to be a glowing green box that thrummed softly as it powered the totality of her being. “Now you go.”

“CERTAINLY.” He reached to panel in his chest, pulling it open and exposing what was indeed a large wheel with a determined-looking squirrel on it, running at a rapid pace, feeding power to the miniature flywheel hooked to the axle there. “DO YOU LIKE IT?”

Candroid nodded as she screwed her service panel back in. “It’s a very unique way of providing power. But if it works, it works, I guess?”

Norm closed the panel again. “THAT IS WHAT DAD ALWAYS SAYS. THAT, AND ‘JUNK PILE’.” The steady pitch of his voice faltered for a moment, losing a bit of it’s audio compression before snapping back.

“I’m … sorry?” Was that an appropriate thing to say? She really didn’t know. “If it is any sort of consolation, I do not see a logical reason why such an epithet would apply, at least from your outward appearance.”

“IT IS NOT, NO,” he said. “DO NOT WORRY. SOMEDAY I WILL PROVE MYSELF TO DAD. PERHAPS I WILL FOLLOW IN HIS FOOTSTEPS AND GIVE HIM A VERY IMPRESSIVE INVENTION OF MY VERY OWN. TIME TRAVEL OR SOMETHING EQUALLY ADVANCED. THEN HE WILL VALUE ME, FOR SURE.”

“That sounds like a plan, yes,” Candroid replied. “Which is probably more than I have. At least I have some friends. Like Balthazar Horowitz, though his affection for ball pits does not compute fully.”

“YES, INDEED,” Norm repeated. “IF I ACCOMPLISHED SUCH A THING FOR HIM, PERHAPS WE COULD PLAY CATCH IN THE PARK.” He produced a baseball from somewhere – one of his pockets or something – tossing it up and catching it in the other hand. “I WOULD LIKE THAT VERY MUCH.”

Candroid focused her optical sensors on the ball for a minute, then turned and glanced at the billboard still leaning on the wall behind her. Eh, the plasterboard woman smiling there would probably forgive her for running off in the middle of their date, right? Probably. (She hoped so.) “We could go to the park and play catch together if you want?”

Norm didn’t answer immediately, and Candroid’s anxiety surged as she wondered whether she ought to apologize for crossing some line she hadn’t known existed. The signals hadn’t yet left her motherboard, though, when he did say something in response.

“YES. I WOULD LIKE THAT VERY MUCH IF YOU WOULD BE WILLING.”

“I mean, I’m flirting with a piece of plasterboard right now. You’d be doing me a favor as much as anyone.”

“AH. I ONCE DATED A POPSICLE-STICK BRIDE.” He turned his palms up. “I DID NOT WANT TO BE RUDE, I KNOW HOW IT IS WITH INANIMATE OBJECTS SOMETIMES.”

“Yeah.” Candroid waved him off. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. She wasn’t nearly as interesting a conversationalist as you anyway.”

Danville was in shambles and people were disappearing, only to be replaced with speaking, ambulatory plants who were apparently planning on turning the whole world into their compost patch. But they were just hunting the humans anyway, and as Candroid and her ten-foot companion set off for the remains of the Danville Central Park, waving politely at the botanical soldiers that they passed, she still couldn’t help but feel that for her, at least, perhaps since the first day she was created, things were finally looking up.

**Author's Note:**

> ~~I ship it.~~


End file.
